Clipboard Cleaner

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A macOS clipboard cleaner panel for Claude Code / Ghostty users. Auto-strips the formatting artifacts (hard wraps, 2-space indents, quote bars, ASCII borders) that ruin every copy/paste from the terminal.

Why this exists

If you use Claude Code CLI, you've almost certainly hit this:

Claude Code prepends a 2-space indent to every output line and inserts hard line breaks at ~80 characters. These artifacts are baked into the clipboard. Every copy/paste needs manual cleanup.

This is a known and widely-reported bug — see the umbrella issue anthropics/claude-code#15199 and its many duplicates (#6827, #859, #13378, and more, with hundreds of upvotes combined). Not yet fixed upstream.

Where it bites globally — the workflow disruption is the same regardless of language:

Where you paste	The pain
Slack / Discord	Even though they render Markdown, the hard wraps shred code blocks on narrow screens — barely readable.
GitHub PR / Issue comments	> quote bars and stray spaces sneak in, looking unprofessional.
Back into the terminal	The worst case. A long command with hard wraps gets pasted as two lines, fails silently.
Notion / Obsidian	The 2-space indent gets misinterpreted as code blocks or block quotes — formatting is destroyed.
VSCode	Every paste needs Select All → Shift+Tab to manually remove the indent.
WeChat / Feishu / Slack DMs	Many IMs don't render Markdown at all, so **bold**, `code`, ## heading show as literal characters — ugly and unreadable.

The community workarounds (e.g., adding "use \\ for line continuations" to CLAUDE.md) cost tokens on every session. This project takes a different angle:

How this tool solves it

1. Background daemon — runs in a Ghostty pane, polls the clipboard every 0.2s

2. Smart capture — only ingests text with terminal formatting fingerprints (hard wraps, indent, quote bars). Plain typing/voice input is ignored.

3. Conservative cleaning — strips hard wraps, quote bars, indents, ASCII borders. Never destroys the internal structure of code blocks, lists, or tables.

4. Inline Markdown decoration transforms — for messengers that don't render Markdown:

   Original	Cleaned
   `code`	「code」
   **bold**	【bold】
   *italic*	italic (markers removed)
   [text](url)	text (url)
   ## heading	【heading】
   ```fenced```	Fence removed, code body kept
   Markdown table	Numbered narrative items
   Box-drawing table ┌─┬─┐	Same — converted to numbered items
   YAML front-matter	Removed
   Horizontal rule ---	Removed
   Obsidian callout [!tip]	Label → 【label】 on its own line

5. History panel — keeps the last 10 cleaned items. Press 0–9 to copy.

Full rules in docs/CLEANING_RULES.md.

Demo

Input (copied from Claude Code):

  ## Steps

  Use `git commit` to commit, and **don't** skip the hooks.
  See the [docs](https://git-scm.com).

Output (paste-ready for any IM or note-taking app):

【Steps】

Use 「git commit」 to commit, and 【don't】 skip the hooks.
See the docs (https://git-scm.com).

Install

git clone https://github.com/manwithshit/clipboard-cleaner.git
cd clipboard-cleaner
python3 -m pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Requirements:

• Python 3.9+
• macOS (uses pbpaste; cross-platform untested)
• Best in a Ghostty split pane next to your Claude Code session

Usage

TUI mode (recommended)

python3 -m clipboard_cleaner.cli

Key	Action
0 – 9	Copy that history item back to the clipboard
↑ / k	Scroll up
↓ / j	Scroll down
PageUp / PageDown	Page scroll
Home / End	Top / bottom
C	Clear panel
q	Quit

Plain mode (pipe testing)

echo '  indented **bold** text' | python3 -m clipboard_cleaner.cli --plain

Recommended alias

In your ~/.zshrc:

alias clip='cd /path/to/clipboard-cleaner && python3 -m clipboard_cleaner.cli'

Design principles

• Conservative cleaning, no collateral damage. The default never breaks code blocks, lists, or tables — only fixes high-confidence noise.
• IM-visual-equivalence. When mapping Markdown markers, the goal is "still visually emphasized in plain-text contexts," not lossless conversion. So **bold** → 【bold】 is fine; it doesn't round-trip.
• Ghost-capture filter. Text with no terminal formatting fingerprints (voice input, normal app copies) is silently skipped — better miss than spam.

Architecture

┌──────────────────┐    ┌─────────────────┐    ┌─────────────┐
│ clipboard/monitor│──▶│ has_format_     │──▶│ cleaner/    │
│ pyperclip 0.2s   │    │ artifacts() gate │    │ pipeline.py │
└──────────────────┘    └─────────────────┘    └──────┬──────┘
                                                     │ queue
                                                     ▼
                       ┌─────────────────┐    ┌─────────────┐
                       │ state.AppState  │◀──│ tui/app.py   │
                       │ history 10 max  │    │ digit-copy   │
                       └─────────────────┘    └─────────────┘

See docs/TECHNICAL_DESIGN.md for details.

Tests

python3 -m pytest tests/ -v

158 tests, including golden fixtures, cover the cleaning rules with common and edge cases.

Known limitations

1. With a 0.2s poll interval, very rapid copy-A-then-copy-B sequences may miss A.
2. Extremely short Claude outputs with no formatting fingerprints get filtered out by design (preferring "miss" over "false-positive on voice input").
3. macOS-only — Windows / Linux untested.

License

MIT